"As they carried you from the room, master, I thought I saw a woman's form gliding stealthily on before, through the dark corridors. A blaze of lightning illumined the hall for one brief instant, and I can swear I saw a woman's face--a white, mocking, gloriously beautiful face--strangely like the face of your first wife, master, Pluma's mother. I knew it could not be her, for she was lying beneath the sea-waves. It was not a good omen, and I felt sorely afraid and greatly troubled. When I returned to the room from which they had carried you--there lay your fair young wife with a smile on her lips--but the tiny babe that had slumbered on her breast was gone." "Oh, God! if you had only told me this years ago," cried the unhappy father. "Have you any idea who could have taken the child? It could not have been for gain, or I should have heard of it long ago. I did not know I had an enemy in the wide world. You say you saw a woman's face?" he asked, thoughtfully. "It was the ghost of your first wife," asserted the old housekeeper, astutely. "I never saw her face but once; but there was something about it one could not easily forget." Basil Hurlhurst was not a superstitious man, yet he felt a strange, unaccountable dread stealing over him at the bare mention of such a thing. It was more than he could endure to hear the name of the wife he had loved, and the wife who slept beneath the wild sea-waves, coupled in one breath--the fair young wife he had idolized, and the dark, sparkling face of the wife who had brought upon him such wretched folly in his youth! "Have you not some clew to give me?" he cried out in agony--"some way by which I can trace her and learn her fate?" She shook her head. "This is unbearable!" he cried, pacing up and down the room like one who had received an unexpected death-blow. "I am bewildered! Merciful Heaven! which way shall I turn? This accounts for my restlessness all these years, when I thought of my child--my restless longing and fanciful dreams! I thought her quietly sleeping on Evalia's breast. God only knows what my tender little darling has suffered, or in what part of the world she lives, or if she lives at all!" It had been just one hour since Basil Hurlhurst had entered that room, a placid-faced, gray-haired man. When he left it his hair was white as snow from the terrible ordeal through which he had just passed. He scarcely dared hope that he should yet find her--where or how he should find her, if ever. In the corridor he passed groups of maidens, but he neither saw nor heard them. He was thinking of the child that had been stolen from him in her infancy--the sweet little babe with the large blue eyes and shining rings of golden hair. He saw Pluma and Rex greeting some new arrivals out on the flower-bordered terrace, but he did not stop until he had reached his own apartments.